Steve on his guitar style:

"If I had to summarise the playing style that I aspire to, it would be something like: free improvisation with touches of unhinged noir.
Once I'd learned the basics of the guitar and was able to at least understand what people were trying to achieve with their soloing, I realised that I didn't really want this.
I've always chased a guitar sound that is more about expressiveness, texture, soundscapes, atonality and noise dissonance, rather than being melodic. I do actually know a reasonable amount of music theory (but I don't read sheet music for guitar). Many years ago, I taught electric guitar (both privately and in schools).
As much as possible, I want to unlearn the scales and patterns that my finger memory leads me towards. So, I consciously try to stop myself going somewhere comfortable on the fretboard and go somewhere unfamiliar. I force myself to stray into the badlands... Things that jar, rather than flow. That might be a chord shape or interval that I've never tried before (and can't name when I play it), or it might be a new way of thinking about the instrument as an electric sound-making device, rather than as the electrified version of an acoustic guitar (with all of the baggage, expectations and tradition that this brings with it).
I've always admired how Robert Fripp guested on releases by David Bowie ("Scary Monsters and Super Creeps') and Blondie - 'Fade Away (and Radiate)'- sprinkling swathes of avant-garde, dissonant guitar parts over song-based tracks. In this same category, I admire how Adrian Belew put unconventional solos all over music by Talking Heads ('The Great Curve') and Bowie's 'Red Sails'. I guess that Marc Ribot's atonal jazz gypsy-esque arpeggios (Marc has referred to it as: "gypsy music a la Django Rheinhardt, Cuban music and certain early rock things like Duane Eddy") with Tom Waits (for example, 'Jockey Full of Bourbon') also falls into this category: a sideman that adds touches of unhinged noir (!).
I also like the free jazz playing of James Blood Ullmer.
If playing becomes too studied, too theory-based, or too virtuoso, I lose interest. Concentrating on technique (whether it's folk picking or million note shredding) is tedious to me. So, is over-rehearsal. I'd rather deliver a technically flawed performance that is authentic, than a perfect one that is sterile. I've always been quite resistant to re-recording and re-mixing my music. I don't really care if the quality is lo-fi (and I stay that as a former sound engineer!), if the music has something to say.
I've always liked the attitude of 'No Wave', where punk became heavy metal/jazz metal without the blues and rock cliches. I seem to have spent a lot of my career trying to unlearn all of the late 60s bedroom guitar stuff (anaemic 12 bar blues and misunderstood covers of songs from the delta). When you really go back and listen to the source material, those players didn't play neat pentatonic scales over 12 bar sequences. They stayed on the root chord until the moment was right to do something else. Their guitars were out of tune, broken, complicated and angry. The appropriated English blues wave seemed (to me) to omit much of that. It was cleaned up and packed to sound acceptable. I want something that is more in the spirit of a free jazz sax player, than a UK blues guitarist. I want to drop the pentatonic scales and create atmospheres, sounds and ambience. So, I like a lot of John Zorn's stuff and Bill Frisell as a guitarist. And, of course, Glen Branca.
On occasion, I do throw in cliches of rock and blues players, just as a retro homage. However, I usually go there and then subvert expectations. So, I might play a bit of Jimmy Page (say, 'Heartbreaker'), or a 50s', Chuck Berry type thing (think 'Johnny B. Goode'), before completely deconstructing the next phrase, like ripping down the poster to show that all of this is being deconstructed.
If you listen to what I was doing in the band If It Bleeds..., on a track such as 'Jailhouse Rock', the timing is the same as the original, but I'm playing some intentionally discordant extended chords on the verse stabs. This is supposed to be the sound of anguished inmates breaking things on walls, scraping furniture across metal bars, not something safe for privileged teens to dance to at a home counties' Hop (!). I see this as being a very 'jazz' attitude. Taking popular songs and then ripping them apart, showing what they could have been (see also: Richard Thompson's cover of Britney Spears 'Oops I Did It Again').
One of my big guitaring heroes is Keith Dobson (originally the drummer from hippy space psych band, Here and Now). He is responsible for Fuck Off Records, The O12 and World Domination Enterprises. In the latter, he took well-known contemporary pop (such Lips Inc's 'Funkytown' or LL Cool J's 'I Can't Live Without My Radio') and tore them into noise-guitar manifestos.
I also really like avant-garde free improviser Derek Bailey (b. 1930 in Sheffield, UK, d. 2005). Another reference point is British free improviser, Fred Frith b.1949 (and his playing with the avant-rock band, Henry Cow). His 1974 album 'Guitar Solos' is considered a landmark in redefining the sound of the guitar.
My other influences include: Hendrix (obviously!), Steve Albini (for example: Big Black’s ‘Kerosene’ and Rapeman's 'Just got paid'). In fact, I like a lot of the guitar playing from the 80s US hardcore and straight-edge punk scenes. Captain Beefheart is also somewhere there in my mix. Further inspiration comes from the guitar attitudes found in work by: Sonic Youth, Stereolab, the 80s, UK shoe-gaze indie bands ((My Bloody Valentine, Slow Dive, The Cocteau Twins etc), Masami Tsuchiya (who played amazing solos with Japan and David Sylvian) and, from the UK post-punk scene, Gang of Four.
I only recently became aware of the Brian Eno track 'Third Uncle' from 1974. The guitar on this track (by Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music) is SO ahead of its time and very much in the direction that I am inclined towards.
Adrian Belew has been hugely influential on me. His soloing with Bowie, Talking Heads and KIng Crimson (in the 'Discipline' period) was one of the first things (along with Robert Fripp) to show me that there was an alternative path for guitarists.
Nels Cline is a guitarist that I also like (for example: see the Nels Cline Trio album 'Chest'). I'm also interested in younger, 21st-century sonic artists working with noise guitar, such as the Chinese experimentalist, Li Jianhong.
Finally, there have recently been a few relatively new guitarists that have caught my eye as continuing to pursue the 'atonal, noise guitar project'. Firstly, St. Vincent (she even covered Big Black's ‘Kerosene’), then there is Mark Bowen from IDLES and also Anna Calvi".